


Stardust and Carborundum

by Issay



Series: One-shot collection [9]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bad Parenting, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Prostitution, Slavery, Timeline Fuckery, guardians of the galaxy vol. 2 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 17:47:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10836234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Issay/pseuds/Issay
Summary: Maybe in a different life they could fall in love, he could take her away from this dumpy little brothel on Contraxia, and they could have a life together, a house, some children. But he’s a Ravager and she’s a whore, it is what it is and there’s no way around it.





	Stardust and Carborundum

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't seen "Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2", bookmark this fic and come back after you've seen it. No, seriously, this fic includes MAJOR spoilers. It's so spoilery I wasn't sure how to even tag this.  
> (And for the record, this was supposed to be a tiny character piece, 800 words max. But plot bunnies.  
> Also, I think that's my first attempt on heterosexual smut so...)

She has sad eyes. Fuck, what a cliché. A whore with sad eyes.

“Come here, girl” he says, his voice hoarse with disuse. Slowly, almost hesitantly she makes her way to the bed he’s on; dim light in the room makes her silvery skin glow. She’s a pretty one – small, lithe, with silver skin and long, purple hair. He can see a slaver’s mark on her almost unblemished forearm. Yondu supposes the owner of this brothel had paid a pretty sum for her which explains the cost. But it matters not, Yondu has enough credits to pay for a full night with her and then some.

And he doesn’t remember the last time he got off with something else than his hand. Kree battleships aren’t the best places for any kind of romance.

Yondu slides his hand down her side – she’s naked, he told her to get rid of that ridiculous sheer robe she was wearing a few moments ago – and pushes his fingers between her thighs. The girl is absolutely dry and starts to tremble, like she’s afraid of him. Which, to be fair, she probably is. Yondu sighs. It won’t do.

His fingers dig into her skin as he grips her and pulls down, shifting slightly. The girl is now lying on him, her back to his chest, and Yondu almost purrs with the sudden amount of contact. Her muscles are tight and he knows she’s fighting a fight or flight response. He figures he’s one of the first clients she’s ever had. Well. She really could do worse.

“Relax,” he murmurs, his fingers skimming down the sides of her neck, painting invisible swirls on the soft skin of her breasts, down her belly and further, to rest on her cunt. For a moment they’re both completely still, his hands warming her, her breath short and unsteady. “We have time and I don’t care for a scared partner.”

After a moment she starts to relax and his fingers move slowly, sliding through her folds. Yondu hasn’t pleasured a female companion in years but it’s one of those things you just don’t forget how to do. He marvels at how similar it is with every humanoid species – the mechanics are pretty much the same, even if the visuals differ. The girl on his chest sighs, her body warming up, chasing his touch. Yondu chuckles, strangely satisfied. But now all that squirming made his need more urgent, it now burns low in his stomach. So the moment she falls apart under his fingers Yondu flips her so that the girl’s face hides in the crook of his neck, and thrusts in, still feeling the pulsating trembling of her cunt.

She gasps, her moist lips caress the skin of his neck and it’s too much, and it’s not enough. The push and pull, the way her body answers him and moves against him, the way her skin smells of bitter vanilla. Yondu almost forgets that he’s paying for the privilege of fucking her, that she’s a professional and come tomorrow she won’t even remember his face. That he doesn’t know her name. It’s enough to build an illusion, at least for now.

Maybe in a different life they could fall in love, he could take her away from this dumpy little brothel on Contraxia, and they could have a life together, a house, some children. But he’s a Ravager and she’s a whore, it is what it is and there’s no way around it.

After he’s sated and satisfied all of his needs – for now, he knows, it takes more than one night to make up for the lost twenty years of his youth – they rest, legs and hands tangled, her nose pressed to his neck, scent of bitter vanilla filling his senses. Yondu’s comfortable and his skin tingles with contact. It’s nice, for sure more pleasurable than the electrocution he’s gotten used to.

The soft lull of her breath almost puts him to sleep so to wake himself up – sleeping in a brothel isn’t really an option – he opens his mouth and starts talking in short, rough sentences. About his parents and how they sold them to a slaver. About cages, auctions, being sold like an animal. About Kree warships and pain, death, hopelessness. The whore’s fingers gently caress his scars, she covers his skin with her touch as if she can undo every torture, wipe the memories out. Or maybe she’s just bored and he’s overthinking this. Anyway, he’s paying for her time so it’s not like she can protest, right?

Neither of them sleeps that night, even after he’s done talking. He plays with a bracelet on her arm, a pretty little trinket made of carborundum and cheap stardust beads. She continues to stroke his skin and he doesn’t mind because on the Kree warships non violent skin-on-skin contact was a commodity as rare as health or happiness.

In the morning Yondu leaves her with a wad of spare credits and a tender kiss, her sky blue eyes kind and smiling.

*

Yondu works for Stakar and learns the ropes, learns the trade, learns that sometimes fists speak louder than words and that the strong will rule the weaker. He listens to stories of heists and thinks how he would do them, what he would improve. He watches Stakar and makes note of how to inspire loyalty and when to strike fear. Yondu keeps his head down and does his job, earns respect, makes a name for himself. Yondu Udonta, he calls himself these days, knowing that someday soon he will have his own Ravager Clan and that names are important.

He visits his blue-eyed whore every once in a while. Contraxia is a popular Ravager stop and that little brothel stands a bit on the side, the owner is of the accommodating sort so Yondu can message ahead and have her waiting for him, warm and clean and smiling.

One night, when he’s too sore and too tired to fuck her more than twice, she whispers tales of her homeworld, a planet with red sky and golden, hot sands, with cool oceans and rain of pure platinum. She tells him about how she was abducted and sold, how he was the first man to ever touch her with kindness. He kisses her then and for a moment it doesn’t feel like a business transaction.

They have rituals, the two of them. Yondu comes to her straight off the ship – so she helps him bathe in purified water and scented oils. Sometimes she patches him up, bandages his wounds and hums lullabies as he rests, their limbs tangled, his lips on her skin. She knows the places to touch, the scars to leave alone. He brings her little trinkets from his heists, pieces of jewellery and pretty, sparkly things from the planets he’s visited. It’s all stolen, of course. She laughs and admires them, and makes sure to wear them.

Once, he arrives and there are bruises on her face, dark imprints of another man’s fingers on her bare forearms. That’s the day the brothel owner learns that Yondu Udonta’s whore is to remain unharmed or he’ll break your arms. All seventeen of them.

The years pass and they change – he grows a bit softer, a bit kinder in the way he touches the skin on her breasts when she reclines against him, the way he fucks her with his tongue. She grows harder and more jaded, with the sarcastic comments she sometimes throws under her breath about life in the brothel and about other clients. Sometimes she passes him intel on big transports. The whores hear a lot of things, apparently. Yondu always remembers to give her a piece of the profits if the information is worth it.

One thing never changes. She never offers her name, he never asks.

*

He’s the head of his own Clan when Ego approaches Yondu with a proposition he doesn’t have enough strength of character to refuse. It’s fucking profitable, even if it breaks the Ravager code. Yondu’s crew doesn’t really give a shit so they snatch a kid after kid and deliver them to Ego. Their captain knows something bad happens to those children – but he knows better than to ask questions. No one likes a nosy Ravager, especially the paying clients. So he delivers them and leaves, knowing he'll never see them again.

It doesn’t last forever. He drops off the latest child – a little girl with silvery skin and sky blue-eyes, taken from the world of hot sands and platinum rains – and sets the course straight for Contraxia. His crew is happy, they got paid and there’s downtime coming, booze and whores to buy. They don’t notice that Yondu is in some kind of trance, or that Kraglin’s eyes are filled with unshed tears because he’s spent the whole journey to Ego’s planet playing games with the girl. And now she’s gone, gone, gone.

That night, Yondu whispers apologies into her skin and she dries his eyes with concerned, gentle kisses. He tells her everything. She slaps him and then soothes the red mark on his face with cold hands.

“It’s none of my business,” she murmurs into the cherry leather of his coat when Yondu holds her, completely dressed against her nudity. “I won’t judge. You know it.”

But it’s there, this quiet note of apprehension in her voice, a tiny bit of sadness – for the children? For him? Yondu’s too afraid to ask.

He fucks her desperately that night, with her straddling his lap, facing him, encircled by his arms, blue against silver, with a sort of urgency between the two heated bodies. If he hides his face in her hair and weeps, she doesn’t say a word, just holds him tighter.

As always, he leaves in the morning, still smelling of bitter vanilla.

The next child is a crying, scared boy from Terra and something in Yondu breaks. It’s the first time he doesn’t ask the crew for a vote, he just informs them that the deal with Ego is over, they’ll be keeping the  Terran who was currently leaving snot all over Kraglin’s shirt. Some of the crew protest. Yondu kills three and the rest quiets down.

It’s funny, really, that they get excommunicated by Stakar Ogord the moment they stopped the forbidden practice of child trade. It’s so fucking funny Yondu laughs until he cries.

“Fuck it,” he says after he’s done and goes to the hangar.

There’s a small, old ship there, a one-person kind that is pretty much useless to the Ravagers and only takes the much needed space. So Yondu orders his mechanics to fix it up, clean it and have it ready by the time they land on Contraxia again. No one asks too many questions. Maybe they’re all too scared of his new toy, the arrow.

Yondu is fine with that thought.

“I’m proud of you, girl,” he says the next time he visits her. She doesn’t know it yet but the owner of this sad, seedy establishment is already counting the credits Yondu has paid for her. The whore blinks, surprised. “You survived. And now you’re free.”

“But…”

“I bought you, girl. And I’m telling you, you’re free. There’s a small ship waiting for you, not much but enough to get out of here.”

Her fingers tangle in the material of his shirt, her sky-blue eyes happy and tearful and so beautiful. She stands on her toes and kisses him with utter tenderness, and Yondu closes his eyes, wishing to forever remember the smell of bitter vanilla. He could keep her, they both know that. Have her on his ship and use her whenever he likes, or even share her with the crew. But for once – no, for the second time in his worthless life, Yondu does the right thing.

“My name…”

“Has no meaning to me, girl.”

She slips the bracelet into his hand, cheap stardust beads and carborundum.

“Remember me,” she whispers. And then she’s gone.

*

Over the years, she keeps tabs on him. It’s easier than she thought it would be, really, the Allnet is filled with information on Ravagers and Yondu, as unpopular and universally hated as he is, isn’t hard to keep track of. Sometimes it tempts her to contact him, for old time’s sake. She never does.

She also never goes home. There’s nothing there for her and she’s spent years listening to his stories – now she wants to explore the universe and make some stories of her own. So eventually she steals a bigger ship and takes in a ragtag crew of strays, as rootless and free as she is. The life is good. She still misses him, though.

Of course, she knows all about the boy he took in and how that kid saves the galaxy, about how Ravagers helped protect Xandar. And she’s oh so fucking proud of him.

She’s not far when the transmission comes in – one of the Guardians saying in a breaking voice that Yondu Udonta, Guardian of the Galaxy, fell in a heroic battle that saved the universe. Choking on tears, she sets the coordinates attached to the transmission. The Ravagers may ignore the call but she owes it to him.

She has no idea that precisely this very moment Peter Quill takes the string of carborundum and cheap stardust beads he has seen Yondu take out and touch some many times, and lovingly puts it in his father’s fingers.

The hundred of ships around her surprise and astound her, and she doesn’t even bother blinking back tears any more. No, she lets them fall freely as she and the crew gathered behind her watch the spectacle of bright lights and colors as they bid farewell to the man who gave her the universe.

“Who was he?” asks her First quietly, not fully willing to disturb her grief.

And she smiles because there’s not enough words in the galaxy for an answer to that question.

 


End file.
